04-07-2001

ABORTION: Just a Few Questions About Pro-Choice Dogma

On the evening of Tuesday, March 27, at the Columbus Club in Union
Station, Home Box Office hosted a premiere of a documentary it had
produced, called Soldiers in the Army of God. The "soldiers,"
the most extreme fringe of the anti-abortion movement, believe that
defending unborn victims of abortion entails killing guilty providers of
abortion. They were scary. One of them, whom the Lord had called to
circumcise himself while he was in jail for first-degree murder, had a
bloody-fetus billboard on his lawn. Another had set up a Web site listing
personal details about abortion-clinic staffers-where they lived, where
their children went to school-for purposes best articulated by the line
marked through the name of any such person who had been assassinated. Both
were big fans of Paul Hill, a longtime anti-abortion protestor outside the
Pensacola Ladies Center whose activities, one day, extended to the murders
of an abortion doctor and his volunteer escort. Hill is in the documentary
too, in his prison garb, awaiting the death penalty as if it were a solemn
honor, serenely, soft-spokenly satisfied that he had done the will of
God.


It's a good documentary, and the premiere was, all in all, a good event.
Before the screening, guests, mostly women with some pro-choice
affiliation on their name badges, ate pasta salad and networked.
Afterward, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke. There was a panel
discussion featuring the people who had made the film and perhaps the most
compelling person in it: Linda Taggart, who still runs the Pensacola
Ladies Center despite constant harassment and three murders.


Still, as I sat there, I couldn't help thinking: As frightening as the
"soldiers" are, they are not the worst nightmare of the
pro-choice movement as it currently casts itself.


I am.


Don't get me wrong. I hate the topic of abortion. I hate reading about it.
I hate writing about it. I hate thinking about it. And, to the degree that
I do think about it, I go along with it. I realize that if, tomorrow,
abortion were outlawed, it wouldn't end, it would just revert to being
unsafe. I see how one woman's unborn child could be another's microscopic
mass of cells. And so on.


In other words, when push comes to shove, I am, you know, pretty much
pro-choice.


Not these days. These days, in order to be considered pro-choice, it is
not enough to feel that abortion should be legal. It is also necessary to
oppose waiting periods, parental notification-as well as consent-for
minors seeking abortion, and a ban on late-term abortion. It is necessary
to support public funding for poor women who want to have abortions. On
its Web site, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League
laments the fact of "pro-choice Senators numbering only 32 out of
100" in the 106th Congress. By their definition, a pro-choice
legislator is one who voted 100 percent with them.


I'm sorry, but I find that extreme.


"Extreme," of course, is a word more often associated with the
other side. The pro-life position itself, even when it is not derided as
the ranting of the zealous or sexist, is easily dismissed as the stance of
the judgmental. The most peaceable pro-lifer, after all, wants to impose
his or her view of life on others. Choice, by contrast, is much easier to
hail as enlightened, tolerant, modern. How could it not be? It's
choice.


Whatever the pro-choice movement may have done wrong over the years, it
has succeeded brilliantly in a basic act of transference: For all but the
most staunchly anti-abortion folks, the governing idea has become that
life is an infinitely blurry concept that ought to be subject to
compromise in all sorts of ways, for all sorts of reasons. It is choice
that has become the pristine absolute.


For people who have always felt morally troubled by abortion, but
democratically obligated to respect the panoply of beliefs around it, this
issue is making less and less sense all the time. Both sides, for reasons
of self-interest (i.e., fund raising) and of self-conviction, depict
themselves as the more urgently embattled party. And both sides have a
point: In many parts of the country, access to abortion is, as choice
advocates emphasize, contracting. At the same time, however, the realm of
what is considered politically and culturally reasonable in the area of
abortion-what might be called "the doctrine of choice"-has
expanded, to a degree that the nonabsolutist among us cannot help but find
disquieting.


Somehow, though, we aren't supposed to say that-and our politicians had
better not so much as think it. That, above all, is what has begun to
bother me: The people who ought to be last to condone or commit violence
are those who purport to cherish the sanctity of life. By the same token,
though, the people who ought to be last to stifle debate, and even
dissension, about the nuances of this issue, are those who purport to
champion choice.


Pro-choice groups are doing just that, and doing it in deference to that
favorite metaphorical landmass of special interests everywhere: the
slippery slope. The argument goes: If, today, pro-lifers want a seemingly
commonsense, benign restriction on the right to choose, tomorrow they will
want to take away the very right itself.


I'm not here to tell you that there is nothing to this: The Unborn Victims
of Violence Act, for instance, does seem like a perfect way to establish
fetal rights in one area so as to facilitate establishing them in another.
But I would like to speak up, in my most respectful, least fanatic tone,
for the possibility that there is another side to that slippery slope-a
side we seem to be going down. Is it not OK, for instance, to be given
pause by affluent women who go to fertility clinics to be implanted with
far more embryos than can be carried safely to term? Should too many of
those embryos gestate, the occasion arrives for something that is
tastefully euphemized as "reduction." Is choice that
sacred?


Then, there are all these moral quandaries and outrages that keep
springing up where there should ostensibly be none. Once abortion itself
is established as unobjectionable, selective abortion, which outrages some
groups, strikes me as no problem at all. Having established the idea that
it is the parents who determine the humanity of the entity in question,
what is so wrong with their basing that determination on some
characteristic that they care about, such as gender? The recent
congressional hearings on human cloning raised all kinds of questions
about the meaning of one individual's genetic code, and the implications
of duplicating it. But if the notion of duplicating some human genetic
codes can raise all kinds of questions, why must the notion of destroying
other human genetic codes be considered a dilemma unworthy of
examination?


Meanwhile, medical advances and the tragicomic, post-boomer bourgeois
notion of self-perfectibility have constructed a truly bizarre split
screen across our culture: Over here, couples who are expecting wanted
children are advised to sing to them, to read to them, name them before
they are born. Over there, same culture, same time frame, different
individual, the presumption is that the "entity" remains an
entity until it is born.


I don't know what, if anything, I want political leaders to do about any
or all of this. But I do know that I want political leaders to feel free
to talk about it.


We have had occasion to bemoan the way in which politicians have been
obliged to affect a falsely high degree of moral rectitude in their
personal lives. Here, though, they are obliged to affect something far
more corrosive: a falsely high degree of moral certitude in their
political lives-and on issues such as this, when deep reflection,
confusion, ambivalence would be in order. They can either agree that life
begins at conception, block efforts at widening the availability of
contraception, and "chip away" at Roe vs. Wade-or they can take
exactly a half sentence to acknowledge the difficulty of the woman's
decision, embrace her absolute right to make that decision, and leave it
at that. If this were a remotely sane discussion, it would not be left at
that.


Oddly, it is the Left that has adopted the rhetoric of black and white,
while the Right has seen fit to dive into a sea of gray. Of course, they
have had to: They lost Roe vs. Wade. They have had to accept, for the time
being at least, that the right to abortion exists. It is in their best
interest, electorally and strategically, to seem moderate, whether or not
they actually are. They do, however, seem to be on to something that their
counterparts are not: Morally, the middle ground on this may well be
nonexistent. Politically, though, the middle ground is vast. I'm standing
on it, and so are most other Americans. There has got to be a serious
dividend for whoever it is that finds a way to claim it.


Tish Durkin

National Journal